Teaching on the South Side: Cultural Capital
I’ve been keeping a journal regularly since 1988, but it is filled with stream-of-conscious ramblings that I would never show anyone else. It’s too personal, too disorganized, too raw. It’s been good for keeping me in touch with myself and with the act of writing, but it hasn’t gotten me any closer to my childhood goal of writing best-selling novels.
So I started this blog, this record of my move to Chicago and my experiences teaching on the South Side, not just as a record, but also as a way to force me to keep an audience in mind as I write, and audience that I can hopefully connect with, an audience I can manipulate into feeling something when they read my writings, an audience I can convince to keep coming back for more, an audience I can turn into a nascent fan base.
My father is probably my biggest fan. I emailed him last night to let him know about my latest updates. He called me this morning to let me know I had let a typo slip through (don’t bother hunting for it, I fixed it right away). He also said, in that paternally-impressed kind of way, “You’ve become quite a theater-goer.” Understandable, since most of my last post detailed the many theatrical amusements Lisa has treated me to since I moved here. I also thought I detected a hint of surprise in Dad’s voice, so my reply was: “I always have been.”
Then I got to thinking: how would Dad have known that? I haven’t lived at home since the summer of 1992. I’ve been home on vacations and holidays (and to help Mom and Dad move from Sawyer to Paw Paw on the day Star Wars: Special Edition opened in theaters). I’ve changed in those years away. I’m not the same kid they sent to Central Michigan University in the fall of 1991.
And yet.
My earliest memory is of seeing Star Wars with my father when I was four (Mom didn’t want to go, so he took me). When I was a kid, Mom and I would spend Sunday afternoons watching old movies on TV.
My first exposure to live theater (at lest the first I remember) was seeing a high school production of South Pacific. Mom (and maybe Dad, I’m not sure) took my sister and I because one of our babysitters, the daughter of a friend of Mom’s, was in the chorus. The next year, Mom took us to see Guys and Dolls. The friend’s daughter had the lead that year.
When I was 12 or 13, Mom and Dad dragged Anne and me to see the traveling company of Cats in South Bend, Indiana. I hated it. It was bad enough that I had to get all dressed up, but then I spent and hour and a half trying to puzzle out the plot before I realized there wasn’t any. Anne, on the other hand, loved it. She loved it so much that, well, if I wanted to embarrass her on line with a more vivid description of her enthusiasm for the show, I could.
The next year, it was Big River, the musical version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that point in my life, I hadn’t yet read the book, so I wasn’t as appreciative as I could have been, but at least this musical had a plot. It was better than Cats.
I could go on cataloging the various shows I’ve seen over the years, both because Mom and Dad took me and later, when I would go to shows in college, or when I did a little acting and stage hand work myself during my graduate school summers, but my point isn’t that I’ve always enjoyed theater.
My point is that I haven’t. I had to be taught to enjoy live theater. And the people who taught me were my parents.
And this brings me to the reason I have logged this entry under the heading of “Teaching on the South Side” and why I have titled it “Cultural Capital.” But before that explanation, I need to show off some of that fancy learnin’ I got from my teacher education classes.
Cultural capital is “the general cultural background, knowledge, disposition, and skills that are passed on from one generation to the next” (MacLeod, 13). It is a theory very heavily entrenched on the nurture side of the “nature or nurture” debate: human beings become who they are not mainly because of genetic predisposition, but because of the environment(s) in which they grow up and continue to live in. Genetics are certainly a factor, as studies of alcoholism and other such phenomena have shown, but environment, parenting, social exposure and the like have a tremendous impact on how a child will develop. This is part of the reason I like theater. It’s the reason my father shouldn’t be surprised to read the list of shows I’ve been to since moving to Chicago. It’s why I shouldn’t think he would be surprised.
It’s also what makes teaching on the South Side so difficult, frustrating, and exhausting for me. My students literally come from a different world. They speak a different dialect of English than I do (which means their speech patterns and pronunciations of “standard” words are often just as confusing to me as their slang-heavy vocabulary), they have different standards of value, they have backgrounds and experiences that I can’t begin to fathom.
I haven’t compared notes with my friend Nate, who recently returned from teaching English in Nepal for the Peace Corps, but I would think that teaching English to a completely different population would be easier than teaching it to a population that has some elements in common with yours, elements that are mostly superficial.
It is my job to teach these students of mine, to give them the tools with which they can choose their own paths in life, make their own destinies.
But then I remember another term I learned in teacher education: social reproduction.
“Several decades of quantitative sociological research have demonstrated that the social class into which one is born has a massive influence on where one will end up. Although mobility between classes does take place, the overall structure for class relations from one generation to the next remains largely unchanged” (MacLeod 4).
I was taken to live theater shows as a child; therefore I still enjoy them as an adult. Some of my students talk with a certain pride about owning a bootlegged copy of the latest theatrical movie release. To say we have different values is a bit of an understatement.
As a teacher on the South Side of Chicago, I am fighting against massive social forces that conspire to keep my students in exactly the same social place their parents occupy and which they currently occupy themselves. And perhaps the most disheartening thing about this is that my students aren’t aware of the forces arrayed against them, and resist the notion that they can do anything to change their circumstances, e.g. get an education. Part of this is typical teenaged fatalism, egocentrism, and naïveté. The other part is social, monolithically, oppressively so. I’d like to think that one person (i.e. me) could make a difference, but it’s hard to maintain that optimism when the societal wheel is crushing you beneath it on a daily basis.
Thank goodness for the escape of live theater.
NOTE: the references to MacLeod refer to Jay MacLeod’s fascinating and insightful study of social forces at work on two different groups of students, growing up in the same disadvantaged urban neighborhood, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Westview Press, 1995). It was required reading in one of my teacher education classes. It challenged and changed my perception of the idea that anything is possible for he or she who works hard enough (what sociologists call the achievement ideology). MacLeod’s findings surprised me, as I think they would surprise most people.
So I started this blog, this record of my move to Chicago and my experiences teaching on the South Side, not just as a record, but also as a way to force me to keep an audience in mind as I write, and audience that I can hopefully connect with, an audience I can manipulate into feeling something when they read my writings, an audience I can convince to keep coming back for more, an audience I can turn into a nascent fan base.
My father is probably my biggest fan. I emailed him last night to let him know about my latest updates. He called me this morning to let me know I had let a typo slip through (don’t bother hunting for it, I fixed it right away). He also said, in that paternally-impressed kind of way, “You’ve become quite a theater-goer.” Understandable, since most of my last post detailed the many theatrical amusements Lisa has treated me to since I moved here. I also thought I detected a hint of surprise in Dad’s voice, so my reply was: “I always have been.”
Then I got to thinking: how would Dad have known that? I haven’t lived at home since the summer of 1992. I’ve been home on vacations and holidays (and to help Mom and Dad move from Sawyer to Paw Paw on the day Star Wars: Special Edition opened in theaters). I’ve changed in those years away. I’m not the same kid they sent to Central Michigan University in the fall of 1991.
And yet.
My earliest memory is of seeing Star Wars with my father when I was four (Mom didn’t want to go, so he took me). When I was a kid, Mom and I would spend Sunday afternoons watching old movies on TV.
My first exposure to live theater (at lest the first I remember) was seeing a high school production of South Pacific. Mom (and maybe Dad, I’m not sure) took my sister and I because one of our babysitters, the daughter of a friend of Mom’s, was in the chorus. The next year, Mom took us to see Guys and Dolls. The friend’s daughter had the lead that year.
When I was 12 or 13, Mom and Dad dragged Anne and me to see the traveling company of Cats in South Bend, Indiana. I hated it. It was bad enough that I had to get all dressed up, but then I spent and hour and a half trying to puzzle out the plot before I realized there wasn’t any. Anne, on the other hand, loved it. She loved it so much that, well, if I wanted to embarrass her on line with a more vivid description of her enthusiasm for the show, I could.
The next year, it was Big River, the musical version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that point in my life, I hadn’t yet read the book, so I wasn’t as appreciative as I could have been, but at least this musical had a plot. It was better than Cats.
I could go on cataloging the various shows I’ve seen over the years, both because Mom and Dad took me and later, when I would go to shows in college, or when I did a little acting and stage hand work myself during my graduate school summers, but my point isn’t that I’ve always enjoyed theater.
My point is that I haven’t. I had to be taught to enjoy live theater. And the people who taught me were my parents.
And this brings me to the reason I have logged this entry under the heading of “Teaching on the South Side” and why I have titled it “Cultural Capital.” But before that explanation, I need to show off some of that fancy learnin’ I got from my teacher education classes.
Cultural capital is “the general cultural background, knowledge, disposition, and skills that are passed on from one generation to the next” (MacLeod, 13). It is a theory very heavily entrenched on the nurture side of the “nature or nurture” debate: human beings become who they are not mainly because of genetic predisposition, but because of the environment(s) in which they grow up and continue to live in. Genetics are certainly a factor, as studies of alcoholism and other such phenomena have shown, but environment, parenting, social exposure and the like have a tremendous impact on how a child will develop. This is part of the reason I like theater. It’s the reason my father shouldn’t be surprised to read the list of shows I’ve been to since moving to Chicago. It’s why I shouldn’t think he would be surprised.
It’s also what makes teaching on the South Side so difficult, frustrating, and exhausting for me. My students literally come from a different world. They speak a different dialect of English than I do (which means their speech patterns and pronunciations of “standard” words are often just as confusing to me as their slang-heavy vocabulary), they have different standards of value, they have backgrounds and experiences that I can’t begin to fathom.
I haven’t compared notes with my friend Nate, who recently returned from teaching English in Nepal for the Peace Corps, but I would think that teaching English to a completely different population would be easier than teaching it to a population that has some elements in common with yours, elements that are mostly superficial.
It is my job to teach these students of mine, to give them the tools with which they can choose their own paths in life, make their own destinies.
But then I remember another term I learned in teacher education: social reproduction.
“Several decades of quantitative sociological research have demonstrated that the social class into which one is born has a massive influence on where one will end up. Although mobility between classes does take place, the overall structure for class relations from one generation to the next remains largely unchanged” (MacLeod 4).
I was taken to live theater shows as a child; therefore I still enjoy them as an adult. Some of my students talk with a certain pride about owning a bootlegged copy of the latest theatrical movie release. To say we have different values is a bit of an understatement.
As a teacher on the South Side of Chicago, I am fighting against massive social forces that conspire to keep my students in exactly the same social place their parents occupy and which they currently occupy themselves. And perhaps the most disheartening thing about this is that my students aren’t aware of the forces arrayed against them, and resist the notion that they can do anything to change their circumstances, e.g. get an education. Part of this is typical teenaged fatalism, egocentrism, and naïveté. The other part is social, monolithically, oppressively so. I’d like to think that one person (i.e. me) could make a difference, but it’s hard to maintain that optimism when the societal wheel is crushing you beneath it on a daily basis.
Thank goodness for the escape of live theater.
NOTE: the references to MacLeod refer to Jay MacLeod’s fascinating and insightful study of social forces at work on two different groups of students, growing up in the same disadvantaged urban neighborhood, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Westview Press, 1995). It was required reading in one of my teacher education classes. It challenged and changed my perception of the idea that anything is possible for he or she who works hard enough (what sociologists call the achievement ideology). MacLeod’s findings surprised me, as I think they would surprise most people.
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